In the frenzied summer of 1943, Rose Valland, the courageous would-be curator at the Jeu de Paume, had to watch the burning of some five or six hundred ‘degenerate’ paintings, many of them stolen, judged by a Nazi-appointed panel of ‘experts’ to have little artistic or commercial value. There was a huge bonfire in the Tuileries Gardens of works by Picasso, Miró, Léger, Ernst and many others. ‘Impossible to save anything,’ she wrote to her boss, Jacques Jaujard, on 23 July. But other than keeping him fully informed of what was happening, which she did constantly, there was nothing more she could actually do.
The Germans continued to propagate the illusion that art in Paris was flourishing, and the American heiress Florence Gould was one of those still visiting the various art exhibitions that the Germans allowed, making the most of Paris cultural life and running her salon. But 1943 was a difficult year, even for her. In March she slipped and broke her leg as she was leaving the Montmartre apartment of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, where she often went in the company of the Comédie-Fran?aise actress Marie Bell. According to Céline, writing after the war, Gould had wanted to buy his manuscripts but he had refused, ‘not wanting to owe anything to the American multimillionaire’. After the accident, Ernst Jünger continued to visit her, sometimes with Gerhard Heller, and on one occasion, according to Heller, Florence introduced a friend as ‘Colonel Patrick’, a German from the Lyons branch of the Abwehr. Possibly he was just another admirer, but she may have needed high-level protection as investigations were continuing into whether or not her husband was Jewish, in which case of course he would be arrested and deported and his extensive properties confiscated and aryanized. Frank Jay Gould had sent off for baptism certificates to prove he was Protestant several months before, but it was only in March that the CGQJ, somewhat reluctantly, agreed that as the Goulds were not Jewish their properties could not be aryanized. Nonetheless the Germans seized control of various Gould hotels and casinos on the Riviera, on the grounds that the owner was now an enemy alien, and administered them until the end of the Occupation.
In October, both Noor and Vera Leigh, the SOE women, were arrested. Khan had managed to transmit some twenty messages while on the run but was betrayed to the Germans, either by Henri Déricourt or by Renée Garry. Déricourt was an SOE officer and former French Air Force pilot who had been suspected in London of working as a double agent for the SiPo-SD. Garry was the sister of Emile Garry, Noor’s organizer in the Cinema network. Allegedly paid 100,000 francs, Renée may have betrayed Noor out of jealousy because she suspected that Antelme had transferred his affections from her to Noor. At all events, on or around 13 October 1943, Noor was arrested and interrogated at SiPo-SD headquarters, 84 Avenue Foch.
Though SOE trainers had at the outset expressed doubts about her gentle and unworldly character, on her arrest Noor fought so fiercely, even biting the officer trying to arrest her, that the Germans from then on treated her as an extremely dangerous prisoner. Her interrogation lasted over a month, during which time she made two escape attempts. Hans Kieffer, number two in the Paris SiPo-SD, told Vera Atkins in a post-war interview that Noor did not give the Gestapo a single piece of information, but in fact managed after all to lie consistently. Yet although Noor did not give away anything under interrogation and refused to reveal any secret codes, the Germans found her notebooks, from which they gained enough information to continue sending false messages imitating her, a ruse that London failed to spot. As a result, three more agents sent to France were instantly captured by the Germans on landing, among them Madeleine Damerment, a twenty-six-year-old postmaster’s daughter from Lille, another SOE agent trained in London.